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Among the things most of us can agree on is that there are still far too few women in positions of responsibility at home and abroad.

So it’s tough to argue with the merit of an initiative at Morgan Stanley, a leading Wall Street investment bank, to launch an investment portfolio that restricts its picks to corporations with at least three women on the board of directors. “It just seemed to make sense, given I’m a feminist and an investment adviser,” Eve Ellis, the executive at Morgan Stanley who with colleague Nikolay Djibankov is running her firm’s new “parity portfolio,” scheduled for an April 1 launch, told the New York Times’ influential DealBook section last week.

In promoting this initiative, Morgan Stanley has cited a report last year by Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse Group AG concluding that over a six-year period, the stock of companies with “at least some” women on the board fared better than those with no women directors. Ellis and Djibankov have also based their strategy on similar research by the consulting firm McKinsey &amp; Co. and by the activist non-profit Catalyst Inc. of New York, which is dedicated to increasing the number of women on corporate boards.

Meanwhile, the European Commission last November approved a proposal to require that women make up at least 40 per cent of corporate directors, a measure that’s not yet law.

Having long ago cofounded a Toronto-based advocacy group arguing for higher standards of corporate governance, I find initiatives like that of Morgan Stanley ennobling.

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Yet I continue to despair over the fixation of corporate social responsibility types with the number of women on corporate boards. If we’ve learned anything about corporate governance from studying the causes of the Great Recession, and the earlier white-collar crime wave centred on the likes of Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc., Martha Stewart Omnimedia Inc. and our own Hollinger family of companies, it’s that boards are about as useful as a donkey at a wedding.

There is, to be charitable, no evidence that would stand up to scientific rigour of a connection between stock performance and the number of women on a board. Look no further than Credit Suisse, with just one woman director, and Switzerland’s other leading bank, UBS AG, with three women directors. Each bank took enormous losses in the latest global credit-freeze catastrophe. And each has lost — and the similarity here is uncanny — 45 per cent of its shareholder value over the past five years.

Coca-Cola Co. has just two women directors and archrival PepsiCo Inc. has four. But Coke is by far the outperformer, with a stock gain of 31.2 per cent over the past five years to PepsiCo’s 10.5 per cent. Costco Wholesale Inc. has fewer women directors (2) than most of its rivals among major retailers. Yet Costco’s five-year stock performance has far outpaced that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (4 women directors), Target Corp. (4) and J.C. Penney Co. (3).

There appears to be an unwritten rule that Canada’s Big Five banks must have at least four women directors, and three of the banks have five women on the board. Yet the disparity among the banks’ stock performance is considerable, ranging from a gain of 43.7 per cent over the past five years (Bank of Montreal, with five women directors) to a low gain of 26.6 per cent (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, with four women on the board).

This long-standing obsession with women directors obscures the crucial point, which is the chronic discrimination faced by women in the workplace. To properly address that, we need:

•Pay equity, at this late date when women still earn only about 70 cents on the dollar for work of equivalent value to men.

•To correct the paucity of women in top management, from which CEOs are drawn.

•An end to the ghettoization of top women managers in human resources, legal affairs and public relations, from which CEOs rarely emerge.

•More women CEOs, the only real decision-makers in business. Yes, there now are about a dozen women CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, including those of PepsiCo, DuPont Co., Xerox Corp., Kraft Foods Group Inc. and Yahoo Inc., up from a lonely Katharine Graham when I first began studying business. That was 30 years ago. Today’s 2.4 per cent of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is cause for only muted celebration.

Speaking of CEOs, one of the best in North America is Linda Hasenfratz at auto-parts maker Linamar Corp., whose investors have reaped an 81.6 per cent gain over the past five years. That period was marked by a 40 per cent plunge in North American vehicle sales in 2009-11 and the bankruptcy of customers General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp.

The superbly run Guelph-based multinational has just one woman director: Linda Hasenfratz.

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